


Well your kisses burn but your heart stays cool

by whoistorule



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 03:50:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/819626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whoistorule/pseuds/whoistorule
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps that was why he walked the wall instead.  At least there when the wind bit his face and his hands shook with cold, he could picture her alive, beside him, the only red on her the type that knotted and curled from her head.  Kissed by fire.</p><p>--</p><p>This is a (belated) birthday present for <a href="http://jon-snow.tumblr.com">Zoe</a>!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Well your kisses burn but your heart stays cool

**Author's Note:**

  * For [questionablemorals](https://archiveofourown.org/users/questionablemorals/gifts).



He walked the wall most nights now, a furred and feathered crows moving softly against the black of the sky, his feet crunching in the graveled ice.  It had been only a few short weeks since Castle Black clanged and cheered with hollow merriness of wedding bells, and Jon found himself thinking about them often, Alys Karstark and her new wildling husband.  They would breed a new kind of northman together, he knew.  One that would withstand this winter and the next, and the thousand after that, so long as the wall held strong.  (So long as the watch held strong.)

It was a queer ritual the red priestess had performed, but these were queer times, and who was he to say which gods held dominion here.  The red god was as old as his own, and he had seen proof of his power in her cats eyes, and the glow of her red gem round her throat.

He wonders what Ygritte would have said about that wedding, wonders if she would have found the Karstark girl properly stolen.

 _You know nothing, Jon Snow,_ she whispers in the winds voice, _it was Sigorn of Thenn who was stolen that night, by a Southern girl.  She stole him with a castle and a song, and he knelt for her._

 _"_ The way I knelt for you?" he wants to whisper back, but it's of no use.  She died far below the wall, an arrow biting her throat until it bloomed red with blood, red as the priestesses gem against her pale skin.  Fire's last kiss.  It wasn't his arrow, but his phantom hands drew it back each night as he dreamed of her.

Perhaps that was why he walked the wall instead.  At least there when the wind bit his face and his hands shook with cold, he could picture her alive, beside him, the only red on her the type that knotted and curled from her head.   _Kissed by fire._

"You know nothing, Jon Snow."

It wasn't the wind this time, it was her, her voice, her hair, her smile coming toward him in the darkness.  Not a white walker, either, but a real woman of flesh and blood.

He shook his head, and when the ghosts cleared, the woman remained, but her fiery hair was replaced by a truer red, her wildling clothes by red robes, her pale throat marked by a red gem.

"Lord Snow," she smiled her knowing smile, and Jon felt himself shiver from something quite other than cold.

“My lady,” he said with a nod of his head.  She did, as she always did before, walk the wall without coat or cloak, her pale fingers brushing against her red robes.  “The air up here-- are you not cold?”

“Warmer than you Jon Snow, my god warms me.  He could warm you, as well, if you would let him.”

“Thank you my lady, but my answer remains no.  I do not think your god could provide the same warmth he brings you."

She stepped closer and Jon found himself wishing he had Ghost with him this night, but tonight Ghost hunted alone.  Perhaps he ran far from the wall, perhaps his hot breath melted the snow above her bones.  Was her hair still red beneath the frost?  Was her throat still pierced with his phantom arrows?  He wondered if her ghost laughed still, or was she at peace at last.

Melisandre walked towards him and brushed her hand against his cheek, grasping his chin between two thin fingers.  She was hot to the touch, and he felt himself flushing.  When her eyes bore into him, he could feel the other eyes as well; those of the crows that came before him, the men that walked his wall for generations.  He could feel the eyes of his own gods as well, many hundreds of feet below; the red eyes of the Weirwood trees, the ones that watched as he spoke his words.

 _I have sworn to take no wife.  I pledged my life and honor both, but I was an oathbreaker.  Am an oathbreaker.  An oath, once broken, cannot be resewn.  But I have a bastard’s honor, and that is no honor at all._ He thought of her in the caves, of the cool of the air and the warmth of her skin, even as Melisandre’s fingers found purchase against his own rough cheeks.   _You were right Ygritte, we never should have left those caves._ He would break his oath for her again and again.

“Then you know nothing, Jon Snow.”  It was if thinking of her brought her back to him again.  The woman before him changed again, simmered and shifted like the air above a fire, flickering and thick, until it was Ygritte he saw, and Ygritte he heard.  His knees buckled and he wavered, and her face was the last thing he saw before he felt ice crack beneath his head.

\----

When his eyes opened, all he saw was red, blurring and flickering above him; red canopies, red silks, red heat.

“Welcome back to the light, Lord Snow,” a voice said, and he knew at once where he was.   _The red priestesses rooms-- if someone saw_ , “Don’t be afraid, we were quite unseen, I made sure of it.  I thought it better to bring you here than somewhere where someone might see.”

“What happened?” he asked groggily, pulling himself up on the bed, not bothering to ask how she knew what he thought.  It was uncanny, but so was she, and to admit it would be to give her power over him.

She smiled, and he felt himself shiver again, despite the heat of her room.  All around them candles flickered.  “The sudden heat after all that cold air,” when she walked toward the bed, she wavered with the heat of the air.  The light bent around her like a halo, as if she were coated with fire.  No, she was fire itself, but of a queer kind.  Light without depth, heat without warmth.  “You fainted.  I brought you here, out of the cold.  You were chilled to the bone.  You should not walk the wall without your wolf at night, you need more than your crows cloak to protect you.”  She gestured to the ground where it lay folded and mottled.  It looked like the dead. 

But for the furs that lay across his midsection, Jon realized all at once that he was naked.  Heat rose pink on his cheeks.  “You undressed me.”

“Your furs were soaked through, as was your skin.  It’s best not to treat frost with direct heat.  You must let it warm bit by bit, until it comes alive again.”  She laughed, but not cruelly, and Jon again wished he was more covered.  

“Are you worried we are unequal now?”  With a swift motion, her robes came undone, falling to the stone floor beside his own.  Beneath them she was bare.  Jon felt his jaw drop, but was unable to stop it.  Instead he closed his eyes, but it did him no good.  In the dark of his mind, the fires of the room still wavered, only it was Ygritte’s shape they took.

“Open your eyes Jon Snow.”  He obeyed, and she loomed before him, bent next to her bed, her knees cushioned by his own crow’s cloak.  “You want me.”  It was not a question.

“I took vows--”

“You took vows to take no wife and father no children.  I will bear none of yours tonight; children drain and it’s healing you need.  Your fires are burning low.  And as for wives, well my god is more than enough for me.”

He did.  Of course he did.  How could he not?  The woman before him was half Ygritte and fire straight through.  

“Jon Snow, I will not do anything you do not want me to do, but let me heal you.”

When she touched his cheek, he could hear the air crack like thunder and he flinched, but her fingers soothed against his skin.  “I want you,” he heard himself say, and it was Ygritte that smiled back at him.

_No, not Ygritte, just another glamour.  You saw what she did to Mance.  You know her powers._

“I want you.”  When he kissed her, he felt her shudder beneath him, and for a second it was neither the priestess nor Ygritte he saw at all, but another woman, wise and weathered and tattooed with red flames, but she melted and the priestess appeared again in the thickening heat.

_Night gathers and now my watch begins._

He flipped Melisandre against the bed, his lips tearing at her skin, wolflike.  He once pressed butterfly kisses to Ygritte, but those were giving, worshipping, and these are meant to take.

 _It shall not end until my death_.

Jon’s mouth nipped at her breast.  Each kiss he stole from her pale skin gave him more strength than the last until he was kneeling between her legs, furs discarded on the stone floor.

_I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children._

He drank in Melisandre’s heat like liquid fire that burned him through.  Ygritte had gasped when his lips brushed her cunt, his tongue pressing between her folds, her red hair damp and sweet, but Melisandre was bare, and the only sounds she made were strangled and foreign.  Prayers, he would guess, to her fiery god.

 _I shall wear no crowns and win no glory_.

Melisandre’s fingers twined through his curls, pale against the black, and she tugged.  He lapped at her fervently, and felt his stomach clench, his veins singing, burning, _alive_.  Jon could feel himself hardening even as he drank her in.

_I shall live and die at my post._

Upwards his head jerked as she pulled him off of her, met his wet mouth with her own hungry one.  Her teeth sunk into his lips, and she licked them clean, tasting herself as she turned round him, until it was Jon’s back against the bed, and Melisandre above him, twisting and pulsing in the heat.

_I am the sword in the darkness._

Her hand closed round his cock, and Jon shuddered.  He hadn’t known how hard he was until she touched him.  

 _I am the watcher on the walls_.

Bright and white amidst the red, Melisandre’s body shone, soaked in sweat, in heat, in him.  He saw her smile as she sunk upon him, her cunt wet and inviting.

_I am the shield that guards the realms of men._

There in the heat of the room, Ygritte appeared again before him, her face crooked and familliar, her red hair tumbling across her shoulders.  She was as he remembered, skinny and yet muscled, with red hair bright between her thighs.  "You know nothing," the priestess whispered in Ygritte's voice, between Ygritte's lips, "Jon Sno-oh- _oh_."

Jon's body pulsed, vows forgotten at the sight of her face once more, the feel of her lips against his.  He was the maid once more, and she the practiced spearwife.  Eyes shut, he could still see her, hear her voice as she came.  When she rolled off of him, he kept them shut, imprisoning her beneath his eyelids, until he could squint them closed no more.

_You can't steal a ghost, Jon Snow.  You know nothing._

The light seemed dimmer now, and the Lady Melisandre colder as she lay beside him, but his own skin pulsed and vibrated with heat.  The faintness that had lain along his bones was gone, and he felt invigorated.  For the first time in a long time, he felt like Jon Snow, and not Lord Snow.

Quietly, he dressed, as Melisandre lay quiet.  She watched him, he knew she watched him, but he no longer cared.  Some of the mystery had left her, and some of the power, too.  She looked older somehow, and the gem at her throat, duller.

“Don’t worry, Jon Snow, I won’t seek to steal you again.”  Once more she stole the thought from his head, answering his questions before he could ask them.  “But do not let your fires burn so low.  There are enemies all around you.  Daggers in the dark.”

She was speaking in riddles again.  It was brothers that surrounded him, and their obsidian daggers were meant to protect them all from what lay beyond the wall.  “I do not take your meaning, my lady.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

He waited for the refrain, the one he knew so well, but it did not come.  She no longer looked like Ygritte, it was if he’d stolen that from her with her heat, with her fires, with her light.

“I must take my leave, my lady.  The wall should not go unpatrolled.”

“Of course.  Good bye Jon Snow.”

He nodded and made his way back to the surface of the Wall, the ropes and gears whirring as he was pulled up into the night.

“I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch,” he whispered as he rose, “for this night and all nights to come.”


End file.
